There has been a field of philosophy for quite a long time called "epistemology naturalized." (Here are good articles onnaturalized epistemology and evolutionary epistemology in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) Putting the point simply, the goal of this field is to reconcile two obvious points: Human beings are natural organisms, with cognitive faculties that have resulted from …
Sociology of knowledge: Camic, Gross and Lamont
The sociology of knowledge has received a new burst of energy in the past few years, with quite a bit of encouragement and innovation coming from Science, Technology and Society studies (STS). (STS overlaps substantially with the SSK research tradition described briefly in an earlier post.) Charles Camic and Neil Gross have made very substantial contributions in …
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Paradigms, research communities, and the rationality of science
An earlier post on scientific explanation provoked some interesting comments from readers who wanted to know why Thomas Kuhn was not mentioned. My brief answer is that Kuhn's contribution doesn't really offer a theory of scientific explanation at all, but instead an account of the cognitive and practical processes involved in formulating scientific knowledge. Here …
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Sociology of knowledge: Mannheim
The sociology of knowledge is an interesting but somewhat specialized field of research in sociology. Basically the idea is thatknowledge -- by which I mean roughly "evidence-based representations of the natural, social, and behavioral world" -- is socially conditioned, and it is feasible and important to uncover some of the major social and institutional processes …
Recent thinking about scientific explanation
What do we want from a scientific explanation? Is there a single answer to this question, or is the field of explanation fundamentally heterogeneous, perhaps by discipline or by research community? Do biologists explain outcomes differently from physicists or sociologists? Is a good explanation within the Anglo-American traditions of science also a good explanation in …
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The sociology of ideas: Richard Rorty
Where do new ideas and directions of thought come from? Is it possible to set a context for important changes in intellectual culture, in the sciences or the humanities? Can we give any explanation for the development of individual thinkers' thought? These are the key questions that Neil Gross raises in his sociological biography of …
New tools for digital humanities
One of the innovative papers I heard at the SSHA last week was a presentation by Harvard graduate student Ian Miller, with a paper called "Reading 500 Years of Chinese History at Once". (In the end Ian apologized for only getting to the last 188 years of the Qing Dynasty.) I won't mention the details, …
Neil Gross on mechanisms
Neil Gross offers a friendly amendment to the growing literature on social mechanisms within sociology in "A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms" (link). He offers general support for the framework, but criticizes the main efforts at specifying what a social mechanism is. (James Mahoney makes a major effort to capture the main formulations in "Beyond Correlational …
Causal-mechanisms theory in Europe
The causal-mechanisms theory of social explanation has been influential throughout an extensive network of European philosophers and social scientists, often with a pretty direct connection to the analytical sociology research programme. Peter Hedstrom and his research network are particularly influential in this spread of ideas. It is worth mentioning a couple of books in the …
Current issues in causation research
This week's conference on Causality and Explanation in the Sciences in Ghent was an unusually good academic meeting (link). Participants gathered from all over Europe, as well as a few from North America, Australia, and South Africa, to debate the logic and substance of causal interpretations of the world. Among other things, it provided all …
Understanding Society 